Day 76 Tanami Desert, Renahans Well

 We set my pump to finish early this morning, not only to help ourselves adjust to the imminent time zone change, but to allow for the loss of 1 1/2hrs driving time too. We headed off at sunrise and got to enjoy the spectacle as we drove along the dirt road. The road had deep and hard corrugations and ruts in sections and decent smoother sections in between. 

We observed that another fundraiser car rally was in action along the Tanami today, the Road Boss Rally. It wasn’t as big as the Shitbox rally fortunately, and was well organised. There was a mixture of newer and older cars and when we had pulled over for a break at a road stop, an old ‘80’s bright green Ford Falcon with Hulk stickers on it pulled over and 3 men stepped out dressed up in stereotypical Arab outfits complete with black and white checkered tea towel headwear. Another guy came and spoke to Matt and said he had seen us on Cable Beach with the 3 Clipper line up.

We continued on and just let the rally cars overtake us, as the road was quite wide and most let us know they were wanting to overtake. We had crossed the border into NT late morning, and there was an improvement in the road, with more decent sections, but when the road was bad, it was worse than the WA bad sections. We didn’t see any wildlife on the road, but at our stops, we were seeing droppings and trails in the sand of various animals. We did see one older gentleman towing a caravan in a Landcruiser driving at maximum 20km/hr, with his driver window down, driving at the very edge of the road. We had seen him a long way off and he took along time to reach us, as we had pulled over. They could be taking a few days if they continue at that speed to do the 1000km road. But his car was clean with only a little dust on the back of the caravan, I guess his priority is to keep the car clean, you can never be too careful about these things.😜

To drown out the rattles and squeaks in Bridget and road noise, Matt wore his ear protection headgear and I had my earphones on with Coldplay music going, which made the trip more pleasant for us both.

 There was an occasional bend in the road and slight hill, but otherwise it was fairly flat, with spinifex grasses, wattle, and the occasional gum tree or holly grevillea in the land around us. We did drive past a mine or two, and a fairly large airstrip for the mine with a good sized plane( think jumbo jet. ✈️)on the tarmac, presumably for the FIFO workers. There was also occasionally  burnt out and rusty car wrecks littering the scenery. A clipper club member who is well versed in desert travel mentioned to me that there are many aboriginal monuments along the Tanami, they were marked on a police road conditions report he once had. He soon learned that the monuments were burnt out cars.. I saw 9 of them today.  

As for the road , I can classify it much the same as the Gibb river road, if it’s a white or tan road it’ll be okay, if it’s orange and sandy it’ll be okay if it’s grey and rocky it’ll be rough and lumpy, and if it’s a deep red then  You’re all going to hell in a hand basket. 

We arrived at our destination for the night by mid afternoon, being Renahan’s Well, but one look at the windmill and they haven’t got water out of the well, for a long time. We enjoyed another beautiful sunset, but due to the increasing population of flies and mozzies, I didn’t stay outside for long. Bridget is going well, despite all the squeaks and needing a good sweep and mop after over 420km of dirt road today.